With the development of upstream and downstream industries of the mobile Internet, at present mobile access has gradually become main stream for obtaining access to the Internet. Users use portable terminals such as smart phones and pads to utilize various mobile applications including online shopping applications and social applications. Even at home, a lot of users still prefer to use portable terminals to access a network. At a public place, a user may use mobile data access technologies such as 3G/4G to access the Internet. When a free wireless network access service is available at a public place where the user is located, the user usually chooses to access the Internet via Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). Compared with mobile data access, the WLAN access generally provides a more stable and faster Internet access experience, and significantly reduces Internet access fees for the user.
Public places such as a Haidilao™ restaurant or Starbucks™ generally provide wireless access service for users. As a merchant, Haidilao™ or Starbucks™ needs to construct and manage its own wireless network, such as deploying a wireless network that includes a wireless access point (AP) and a wireless access controller (AC). In this scenario, the merchant such as Haidilao™ is not only an owner of the wireless network but also an administrator of the wireless network, and needs to take security and service quality of the wireless access service into consideration.
From the perspective of security, user identity authentication is undoubtedly an extremely important security mechanism. Wireless authentication modes such as Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)/WPA2 are widely applied to small-sized networks such as a home network, and an administrator of the network informs each authorized user of a secret key in a relatively safe manner. In some medium-sized or large-sized networks deployed by merchants, informing users of a key one by one is obviously unacceptable. Moreover, the mechanism described above runs at a wireless link layer, and therefore has poor compatibility. For example, portable terminals of some users are earlier models, and the wireless technology used on such portable terminals may not support authentication modes such as WPA2.
A portal authentication runs at a layer above the network layer, has general applicability, and is almost irrelevant to hardware of portable terminals of the user and wireless access technologies used on the portable terminals. A user obtains network access permission on the basis of a standard portal authentication process as long as the user accesses a wireless network. However, the portal authentication technology actually originates from the era of personal computer (PC) Internet, and has a technical problem for adapting to the usage characteristics of the mobile Internet.
Referring to FIG. 1, a WLAN Internet access service provided by China Unicom™ is used as an example. After a smart phone of a user successfully connects to an AP of China Unicom™ (accesses a wireless network), on the message prompt bar on top of a screen of the smart phone of the user, a wireless network connection icon 11 indicates that the smart phone has successfully connected to the wireless network. However, at this time, the user may not refresh Weibo™ successfully. The root cause of this problem is that many ordinary users take it for granted that they may access an external network (generally the Internet) after successfully connecting to the wireless network. But in fact, the users merely successfully connect to the wireless network of Unicom™ in a wireless manner. Except for some authentication-free sites (such as a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server), the users cannot access the Internet before passing a portal authentication.
With regard to a user terminal, the portal authentication is implemented on the basis of a browser, and many ordinary users do not know that they need to open the browser to initiate a portal authentication process because this authentication mechanism is different from the authentication mode of wireless networks in a user's homes. From another perspective, even if some users understand working principles of the portal authentication, it is still inconvenient to perform the portal authentication. For example, portable terminals of users generally have a function of automatically connecting to wireless networks to which the portable terminals have previously connected, while many smart phones will automatically turn off mobile data connections such as 3G when the smart phones successfully connect to the wireless network. Once the smart phone of the user automatically connects to the wireless network while the user does not notice this situation, the user will not initiate a portal authentication through the browser. In such a scenario, the user terminal may not access the Internet because the mobile data connection is turned off and problems will occur in many applications that need exchange data online all the time.